Nigh on four years ago now, J. Michael Straczynski, executor of the estate of Harlan Ellison, announced that he would be completing and submitting for publication The Last Dangerous Visions, the long-lost anthology of other people's stories that Harlan had first announced for publication in 1973 and kept on dangling before the public, and the authors in it, with promises for another decade or so, but which kept sitting unpublished in his files for 45 years until his death in 2018.
Progress has been slow, but publication was eventually arranged and announced for Oct. 1 of this year. (To which many wits replied with the title of an old sf story, "October the First Is Too Late.") ARCs are apparently going out, and behold, here's the table of contents.
So what's in there? Harlan had kept buying stories for LDV while not publishing it, so there's no definitive list of what was to be in it, but the single most comprehensive TOC was one associated with an impending three-volume set that was scheduled to appear in 1979. It had, according to my count, stories by 98 separate authors in it. Another dozen or so stories have been known to be on the book's list at other times.
Again, according to my count, 14 of those 98 authors are on the current TOC, along with another 4 from the other miscellanea assorted list. A couple of the titles are different, so it's not entirely sure if they're the same stories. Leaving aside two authors for whom I have no information, 8 of the remaining 16 are deceased.
Plus another 6 stories newly commissioned and added.
As far as I know, only 2 of the 18 backlog authors are female, and only 1 of the 6 new ones is. At least 5 of the 6 are in their 50s.
Let's compare this result with what JMS originally announced in 2020. He notes that "a number of [the original stories] were withdrawn by the writers and published elsewhere," adding that "it makes no sense to republish stories that are otherwise available." Big of him; if the stories were withdrawn, then the Ellison estate no longer owns the rights. He also says that "some of the remaining stories have been overtaken by real-world events, rendering them less relevant or timely, and regrettably will be omitted," but he assures us that "many more" are still "fresh" (yes, after half a century) and that only a "few stories" will be omitted.
Let's note, then, that of the 98 stories on the 1979 list, by my latest count 36 have been published elsewhere by now - enough to make a heftier reprint anthology than the size of this book. With 14 of the remainder being published here, that leaves 48 stories which JMS chose to leave unpublished. That's a lot more than a "few," and includes never-seen work by authors such as Alfred Bester, George Alec Effinger, Vonda N. McIntyre, Edgar Pangborn, Mack Reynolds, Wilson Tucker - all of them deceased - and many others whose work, tucked away in Harlan's closet for decades, will still not be published. Though JMS says he will formally return the rights to all stories he does not include.
The discussion of what's new in the book also sounds as if it'll be a lot more extensive than what we see here, though it's known that a lot of authors JMS approached turned him down, largely due to not wanting to be associated with Harlan's besmirched reputation.
Then JMS writes of "one last, significant work by Harlan that has never been published" that will be included. There's no apparent trace of this in the TOC.
What he doesn't mention that I was most curious about was the introductions. Harlan wrote long and characterful introductions to the stories in his earlier Dangerous Visions anthologies, and when he announced various publication dates for LDV, he'd usually say something like "I just have to go home and finish up the introductions," but the introductions to a hundred-story anthology would be a massive project. Did he ever get them done? Apparently not, though he did start, because Harlan's introduction to exactly one story is included in the TOC.
So it's apparent that LDV as JMS announced it would be a massive project, much bigger than what's being published now, and I wondered if, like Harlan before him, JMS had simply bitten off something bigger than he could chew. My doubt that what he described was feasible, together with his disconcertingly Harlan-like insistence that it was really in the works, led one incontinent Harlan-booster to make the absurd claim that I was invested in the book never appearing. Why would I want that? All I wanted was not to be burned again as Harlan had burned the entire SF community many times.
Had I seen - which I did not, until now - a further announcement by JMS the next year, 2021, I would have seen him backing down. Here he admits that a large percentage, not just "a number", of the original stories were withdrawn, and points out that publishing anywhere near all of the remainder would result in too large a book to be feasible. Yes, well, Christopher Priest pointed that problem out in The Book on the Edge of Forever 30 years ago, so glad that JMS caught up. Though who knows ... with electronic publishing, length of text is less a restriction, but JMS is wedded to the idea of print, as he says Harlan was also.
The second announcement uses the fact that there was never a lasting definitive list of stories for LDV as an excuse for publishing only a tiny selection. That's a fakeout; Harlan's list did alter but it was always very long. And as far as I know he only ever added stories, not voluntarily took them away. JMS says that Harlan "was the first to say that some stories would have to be trimmed to make room for ones that were more current." I don't recall Harlan ever saying anything like that; do you? With that view he ought to have been relieved when space appeared, but he was extremely cross whenever any authors withdrew their stories.
And JMS includes in this second announcement a pitch promoting the idea of what it turns out now that he's actually publishing ... a small selection from The Last Dangerous Visions. Not LDV itself or anything like it, but a nugget. Well, it's better than nothing, to be sure, and I intend to read it; and despite his rhetoric it's a good thing that JMS chose to back down to a reasonable size rather than give up or disappear; but to read an announcement that says The Last Dangerous Visions will be published and then get this ... it's a deflating rather than fulfilling sensation. I was right, whatever the Harlan-boosters may say: what JMS originally described in 2020 could not and never would appear. But I'm not happy about it.
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